Q&A: DNI Chief Scientist Eric Haseltine
Eric Haseltine's rapid-fire delivery reminds one of a supercomputer uploading masses of data. The thin, wiry chief scientist for the director of national intelligence has quickly earned a reputation as both a controversial maverick and a source of inspiration within the U.S. intelligence community. Haseltine's official title is associate director for science and technology for the Office of the Director for National Intelligence (ODNI), where he is responsible for ensuring that U.S. intelligence stays on the cutting edge of research and development.
Haseltine bears one of the more colorful résumés at the DNI. A former director of engineering for Hughes Aircraft, he served as head of R&D at Walt Disney Imagineering, where he managed the Virtual Reality Studio and oversaw key technology initiatives for the Disney Co. After Disney, he joined the code-breaking, eavesdropping National Security Agency as R&D chief, then began work for the DNI in June last year. Haseltine has published over a hundred articles in journals such as Brain Research and Neuroscience Proceedings and has been a contributing editor to Discover magazine, where he authored a monthly column on the brain. He has a Ph.D. in physiological psychology and holds 12 patents in the fields of laser projection, optics, animation tools, and special effects.
U.S. News's David E. Kaplan and Kevin Whitelaw sat down with Haseltine on Oct. 12, 2006. The interview took place at his modest, unadorned office at DNI headquarters.
Extended excerpts from that conversation:
What exactly do you do here?
My official title is associate director of national intelligence, science, and technology. You can think of me as the CTO [chief technology officer] of the intelligence community. The reason we need that function is, think about what technology needs to get done and would only get done by somebody being accountable for the whole enterprise. The first things that immediately come to mind are making sure that there isn't any duplication, making sure that when technology is developed in one agency that it connects to that in another, so that you can take chocolate and peanut butter and put it together and make a Reese's Cup.
The classic example of that is, imagine that you were in a dark room and there was some threat in that dark room you wanted to find. You'd want all your senses coherently focused on it. So that if you saw a little flash of light, you'd also want to be able to hear, to see if something came from that direction. In a sense, the intelligence community agencies are like different sensors. We have some that look at imagery, some that look at chemical stuff, some that look at [electronic] signals intelligence. And just like you in that dark room, if there's a very faint signal there, you're looking at how it looks, how it sounds, how it smells. You want all those faint signals to add to each other so that you know whether you got a problem over there or over there. If you don't have somebody at the top trying to figure out how to get all those things to plug together so that they add up upon each other…then you're not truly leveraging the whole thing. It's to do things that no one else would do unless somebody were held accountable.
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